


Floriography

by chofi



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, apologies to basho, child versions of characters, google research for the win, pre-game, wikipedia research for the win
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 07:24:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7630618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chofi/pseuds/chofi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill of a prompt for 2016's FF7 Fanworks Exchange: "Flower arranging". Tifa, Aerith, and Yuffie plus communication though plants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Floriography

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maegraeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maegraeth/gifts).



_I. "A Lass's Tears"_

Tifa smelled the flowers before she saw them—before she saw anything again. She sat up, slowly. There was pain, a little of it, along her back and sides, and she felt a little dizzy. She fought through it and stayed up to look around her room.

The flowers were everywhere: on the windowsill, on her desk and vanity and wardrobe, on her piano. She remembered family hikes along the hills and named them, like Mama and Papa had. Mountain kings and arnicas. Asters and valerians. Hens-and-chicks and edelweiss. They were clumped together like they would never be up on the mountain. Their scents combined into a strong, too sweet something that made her want an empty room, fresh air, breezes from the mountain on a spring morning.

Her wishes made her remember the feeling of the wind from up the mountain, strong against her face and stinging her eyes.

Then she remembered people bringing white lilies and white roses and wreaths for Mama but that was wrong. _Wrong_. That was why she’d gone to the mountain in the first place.

The wind pawed through her hair and dress as she went down, down, down, _down_.

She clawed at her blanket and screamed.

Footsteps thumping up the stairs, the door to her room bursting open. The flowers shook in their vases and glasses. Papa—and only Papa—at the door, looking scared but not-scared and Tifa began to wonder how that could be.

“Tifa!” Papa was at her bedside in a second, hugging her close and saying her name over and over again. She heard his voice get softer and higher, like someone trying not to cry. Tifa’s eyes stung. She hadn’t been able to find Mama again. Papa was here, and Tifa was safe, _safe_ but Mama…

Tifa howled, and Papa let her.

  


_II. "Open and Honest"_

Aerith thought the tree in the middle of the room didn’t look right. Or maybe it was that the _tree_ looked right, but everything else didn’t.

She was with her mom on the sixty-first floor of the tower. It wasn’t just the two of them, of course, because wherever they went, at least two people from the Professor were there with them.

“We don’t belong here, you know,” Mom said.

Aerith frowned, just like she always did when she wanted Mom to explain something.

“We don’t belong here because this is a place for Shinra employees, and we aren’t employees, are we?” She smiled. “Our followers—” she looked towards the two on the other side of the room “—are, though, so they can stay here. Do you think we’re their guests?”

Aerith frowned, just like she always did when Mom said something Aerith didn’t quite understand. Of course they weren’t employees. “Employees” meant that someone did work and got money for it from their boss. Mom did all kinds of work, and the two of them did all kinds of tests, but nobody gave them any money for it at all.

Aerith walked towards the tree and climbed up the low metal wall that went all around it. (Mom helped her up.) Her feet touched the brown and springy ground on the other side of the wall. This wasn’t like anyplace else in the tower, or at least anyplace that she and Mom were allowed to go.

She got closer to the tree and looked up. The leaves didn’t block out all of the light from the ceiling so here and there a bit of the light peeked through. Maybe _that_ was why the tree didn’t look right: the lights. Aerith didn’t know much of the world besides Shinra Tower, but she was sure that not all lights were blue or green or red.

Still looking up, she moved close enough to reach the trunk. It was rough and dry and, like the ground around it, she couldn't compare it to anything else in her life.

Aerith thought about water going up from the dirt at her feet through the roots, up into the trunk, then out to its branches and to every single leaf.

Then, she felt it: a slow, warm feeling moving up the tree. A soft, cool feeling going down. The warm moved across to Aerith’s arms and all around inside her. She felt a slight weight on her shoulder—Mom, who’d climbed up beside her while she was looking at the tree. The warm feeling moved from Aerith up through Mom’s hand on her shoulder. The coolness circled the opposite way and dipped down.

A picture came to Aerith’s head. A bud inside a seed, fighting to get out, but the shell of the seed is too strong, too strong. The bud needed to fight or it would die without seeing the sun and feeling wind and rain and soil. Then, two more seeds, just like the first.

Mom sighed. “She knows how we feel.” Aerith looked up at her mom. She smiled down at Aerith, and then looked at the tree. “Let me show you how to answer back.”

   


_III. "Long-lasting Feeling"_

The hall reeked, and anyone could see why: orange lilies were everywhere. You expected them in the tokonoma, and they were there, bunched together in plain vase. There were more bunches in plain vases all around the ends of the hall. Everywhere.

Yuffie took off her sandals and stepped into the hall. She shuffled to the tokonoma to get a better look at the scroll hanging there. She stepped on the hem of her robes about a hundred times from the door to the tokonoma, but she didn’t stumble, and she didn’t fall. Ninja training was good for something.

She didn’t recognize the calligraphy on the scroll. Not her dad’s, not belonging to anyone that had tried to teach her, definitely not her own. Her mother’s, maybe? No one really talked about her mother, what she did or didn’t do, what she liked or didn’t like. Nothing. Yuffie decided not to think about her mother.

She took a moment to figure out the characters. Yuffie rolled her eyes. Whoever decided on the scroll was being super dramatic.

> Soon to die  
>  Yet showing no sign:  
>  The cicada’s voice.  
> 

Well, the only ones looking at it would be her dad, her, and some of the Engetsu. She didn’t think any of the Easterners knew enough to read the scroll and know how super dramatic it was. 

She shuffled to the raised platform where the actual signing of the surrender—“ceasefire treaties”, the Easterners insisted, but everyone knew that it was a surrender—was going to happen. More orange lilies, of course.

Yuffie sat down in seiza, making sure her robes were neat. She waited for her father, for the Easterners, for this whole stupid thing to finish to that she could get out of her robes and away.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been the longest thing I've written in a while.
> 
> I was only able to research this through Google and Wikipedia, so if there are any mistakes that you see, please let me know.
> 
> Tifa's section has German mountain flowers and their actual names except for Mountain Kings, which are supposed to be _Eritrichum nanum_ /King-of-the-Alps, renamed because there aren't any Alps on Gaia.
> 
> The tree on the 61st floor is a fountain of headcanon for me. However, most of them involve the Mary Sues I had when I was fourteen, so they won't be showing up on the internet.
> 
> In hanakotoba, orange lilies mean hatred or revenge. You can probably say that it's my version of that [Flower Shop AU](http://demisexualmerrill.tumblr.com/post/145668425096) prompt. So, yeah, it's hanakotoba because Wutai = Japan, though it's probably more Japan + China. The poem that Yuffie sees on the scroll is from Basho. (And probably isn't seasonally appropriate, if what Final Fantasy Wiki says is true and the war officially ended in February, but since the Wutaians are basically signing a surrender treaty in a room full of flowers that say "fuck you", I don't think they'd be worrying about seasonal appropriateness.)
> 
>  
> 
> The titles of the parts are also playing on flower language or names. "Lass's Tears" are another name for Lilies of the Valley, May's birth flower. Violet, the birth flower of February, can mean "frankness". Chrysanthemum, the birth flower of November, means "something enduring" in Western flower language, but can mean different things in hanakotoba.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Grow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10556660) by [sanctum_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanctum_c/pseuds/sanctum_c)




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